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The Online Newsletter of the
Board on International Scientific Organizations

Issue #11, October 2004

Dear Readers:

We are pleased to bring you the Fall 2004 issue of BISO News. The overall goal of the BISO is to strengthen U.S. participation in international scientific, engineering, and medical organizations in order to build their capacity and promote their missions. This issue of our newsletter includes a report of the recent board meeting, at which we welcomed the participation of the Executive Director of ICSU, Thomas Rosswall. Board members also received an update about U.S. membership in UNESCO from Donald Booth, from the Bureau of International Organization Affairs at the Department of State.

A second major goal of BISO is to examine issues related to the conduct of science and evaluate opportunities for, and barriers to, international collaboration in scientific research. BISO continues to monitor progress made in the visa application process and its International Visitor’s Office recently received a “Group Distinguished Service Award” from the National Academies. The award citation reads” For hundreds of individuals and dozens of projects and meetings, the staff of the International Visitors Office has become the best source of information about our government’s current foreign visitor policies and practices and their most steadfast champions in the bureaucratic trenches. This group’s work collaborative work in support of the highest values of science directly benefits not just the Academies and its members but the entire scientific community in the United States and overseas.“ We are very pleased that our efforts to assist scientists and scholars in getting visas have been recognized.

Wendy D. White
Director, BISO

President Bush nominated Dr. Arden Bement as the new Director of the National Science Foundation.  Dr. Bement is the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and has also been serving as acting Director of NSF since February of this year.  Pending confirmation of the nomination by the U.S. Senate, Bement will serve the remainder of the six-year term ending August 2010.

UNESCO
Joining BISO members for the discussion on UNESCO were Donald Booth, Beverly Zweiben, and Guinnevere (Winnie) Roberts, all from the Bureau of International Organization Affairs at the Department of State, and Gene Whitney, Office of Science and Technology Policy. Booth outlined current U.S. priorities in UNESCO: literacy; engineering for a better world; the preservation, collection, and display of cultural objects; water; and press freedom. He reported that Ambassador Louise Oliver, permanent representative of the United States to UNESCO, has been in Paris since March 2004. Ambassador Oliver has staff charged with public affairs, education, science and technology, and culture, who are the main interface with the UNESCO secretariat. An executive director for the U.S. Commission to UNESCO has been appointed and individuals are being sought to serve in ninety commissioner positions with the primary role to outreach to the non-governmental sector. Another key issue that was raised was the need for qualified Americans to apply for job openings at UNESCO.

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Capacity Building

Travel Grants for IUPAC Congress in Beijing
The national committee for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is now accepting applications from young U.S. scientists to participate in the 2005 IUPAC Congress in Beijing, China through the Young Observer Program. The Young Observer program enables young U.S. scientists to participate in the IUPAC Congress as representatives of the United States. Young Observers will have the opportunity to establish international contacts, observe IUPAC committees at work, liaise with the official US delegation, and gain knowledge of global research activities. For more information on the IUPAC Young Observer program please click here.

Summer 2004 Travel Grants
As was reported in BISO News #10, three U.S. National Committees held travel grant programs to assist scientists, educators, and researchers, to attend international scientific congresses during the summer of 2004. Through a joint initiative of the USNC for Mathematics Instruction and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 45 mathematics educators attended the 10th International Congress on Mathematics Education in Copenhagen, Denmark, 4-10 July. For more information on this program, please contact usncmi@nas.edu. The USNC on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, with grants from the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Office of Naval Research, assisted 37 researchers in attending the 21st International Congress on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in Warsaw, Poland, 15-21 August. For more information, visit the committee’s website. With a grant from the National Science Foundation, the USNC for Psychological Science provided partial travel support for 20 graduate students and early career scientists to participate in the 28th International Congress of Psychology in Beijing, China, 8-13 August. More information is available on the committee’s website.

European Young Investigator Award
Brian O'Neill (USA), research scholar at IIASA, is one of twenty-five recipients of the first European Young Investigator (EURYI) Award. The €1 million award will allow him and his IIASA colleagues to carry out his proposed five year project on "Demography, uncertainty, and learning in integrated assessment models of climate change."   O'Neill's proposal was chosen from among 777 submissions by the Heads of the European Research Organisations (EUROHORCs) in collaboration with the European Science Foundation (ESF).   

Pakistan Digital Library Project
In an effort to enhance the scientific capacity of the Pakistani research community, BISO is negotiating the acquisition of journals and databases at discounted prices from U.S. professional societies. Through the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan, fourteen U.S. societies have been targeted as crucial resources for building the capacity of the Pakistan research sector. HEC representative, Kamran Naim, will travel to Washington, D.C. in November to work with BISO Director, Wendy White, on negotiating favorable pricing agreements. Mr. Naim will also train on the systems enabling him pass the instruction onto the research institutions in Pakistan. Lack of access to information hinders research endeavors and this project will result in a significant enhancement of scientific capacity in the research sector in Pakistan. For more information or to get involved please contact Wendy White at wwhite@nas.edu

Multilateral Digital Divide Project
The Office of International Scientific and Technical Information Programs is participating in a three-year initiative on the subject of access to scientific information and the digital divide organized by the InterAcademy Panel (IAP). IAP is a global network of the world's science academies that aims to work with member academies on the scientific aspects of critical global issues; examples of such issues are sustainability, science education, and the digital divide. The Access to Scientific Information/Digital Divide initiative will establish priorities for IAP programmatic approaches to various dimensions of the digital divide.

On 18 November 2004 the French Academie des Sciences will host a preliminary meeting with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academie des Sciences et Techniques du Senegal, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to survey existing international programs related to access to scientific information. Current and past IAP efforts include: the problem of bandwidth, issues associated with the establishment of and access to digital libraries, electronic access to the scientific literature, access to databases funded from public resources, and access to appropriate software tools. Based on this meeting and the findings, an agenda of activities will be outlined as a framework for this initiative.

Chinese Delegation on Scientific Data Sharing
A delegation of Chinese scientists will participate in a series of meetings in the United States in late November 2004 to discuss data sharing and management policies and practices with U.S. government officials, information policy experts, and scientific data center managers. Prof. Guo Huadong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences will lead the delegation, which will meet with senior National Academy of Sciences officials and representatives of the U.S. federal government. The delegates will examine the U.S. legal framework for accessing and managing scientific data, and U.S. federal policies and practices on access to scientific data. For more information please contact Paul Uhlir at puhlir@nas.edu.

CODATA International Conference in Berlin
The 19th International CODATA Conference: The Information Society: New Horizons for Science has been acknowledged as an official thematic meeting of the second phase of the World Summit in the Information Society (WSIS), which will take place in Tunisia 2005. The CODATA conference will be held in Berlin, Germany on 7-10 November. Highlights of the conference include sessions on data preservation and archiving, WSIS, and publication of scientific information. The 24^th CODATA General Assembly will immediately follow the conference on 9-10 November.

Scientific and Technological Issues

Earth Sciences and National Security
On Saturday, February 19, 2005 the USNC for the International Union of Geological Sciences will hold a symposium at the AAAS annual meeting examining the role of the earth sciences in national security. Moderated by national committee members Grant Heiken and Patrick Leahy, the session will consider opportunities for geology and geophysics in national defense and intelligence in topics ranging from international water conflicts, nuclear test ban monitoring and terrain analysis in support of battlefield operations. For more information contact Elaine Lawson: elawson@nas.edu.

Greenhouse Gas Initiative
Margaret Goud Collins, Program Officer for the U.S. Committee for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), presented a poster Modeling Policy Responses to Climate Change: IIASA’s Greenhouse Gas Initiative (GGI) at the Gordon Conference on Science and Technology Policy, August 15-20, 2004 in Big Sky, Montana. The initiative is an interdisciplinary effort aimed at developing a new modeling and decision support framework to assess robust policy responses to the challenges of climate change, its driving forces and possible response strategies from local and national to international levels. The initiative draws on expertise in social and natural sciences and modeling from seven of IIASA’s research programs. IIASA’s GGI results will inform policy makers who want to formulate short- to medium-term policies, in areas including energy, agriculture, and forestry that incorporate strategies for meeting goals for reducing greenhouse gas concentrations. 

Ben Freund, Brown University, was elected president of the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) during its general assembly in Warsaw.

Membership News

We would like to welcome the following members to the national committee network:
Andreas Acrivos, City College of the City University of New York, USNC/TAM
Helen M. Berman, Rutgers University, USNC/CODATA
Michael D. Graham, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USNC/TAM
Myron Gutmann, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, USNC/CODATA
Thomas Lovejoy, Heinz Center for Science, Economics, & the Environment, USCD/DIVERSITAS
Jerrold Marsden, California Institute of Technology, USNC/TAM
Patricia Molina, Louisiana State University, USNC/IUPS
Lynne Parenti, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USNC/DIVERSITAS
James Staley, University of Washington, USNC/DIVERSITAS

We would also like to thank those members who have recently completed their service:
Ron Adrian, University of Illinois, USNC/TAM
Steven Beissinger, University of California, Berkeley, USNC/DIVERSITAS
Theresa Bert, Florida Marine Research Institute, USNC/DIVERSITAS
David Bogy, University of California, Berkeley, USNC/TAM
Jon Clardy, Harvard Medical School, BISO
Lloyd Cluff, Pacific Gas and Electric, Co, USNC/IUGS
Andrew Dobson, Princeton University, USNC/DIVERSITAS
Gary Ernst, Stanford University, USNC/IUGS
Sangtae Kim, Purdue University / National Science Foundation, USNC/TAM
David Kinderlehrer, Carnegie Mellon University, USNC/TAM
Micah Krichevsky, Bionomics International, USNC/DIVERSITAS
Henry Metzger, National Institutes of Health, BISO
Harold Mooney, Stanford University, USNC/DIVERSITAS
Hector Rasgado-Flores, Chicago Medical School, USNC/IUPS
Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S. NMO for IIASA
Marvalee Wake, University of California, Berkeley, USNC/DIVERSITAS
Diana Wall, Colorado State University, USNC/DIVERSITAS
Larry Woodfork, Consulting Geologist, USNC/IUGS

We would like to announce the following changes in committee leadership:
Cynthia Beall, Case Western Reserve University, became chair of BISO in July, replacing Henry Metzger, National Institutes of Health.

Ted B. Belytschko, Northwestern University, was appointed as chair of the USNC/TAM. Former chair, Wolfgang Knauss, Cal Tech, will serve a term as past chair. Nadine Aubry, New Jersey Institute of Technology, takes over from David Bogy, University of California, Berkeley, as vice chair.

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